“I wouldn’t touch that. I get the feeling he’s like Felix Unger. Very anal retentive. He knows exactly where everything goes.” He approached her then, the veil of his ostensible purpose — a harmless house tour — tearing to shed light on what he’d really come for. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to him; his boner lifted the light fabric of his boxers.
“Cut it out,” Claudia said. His penis was still a novelty to her, but she had started to enjoy the mastery she seemed to hold over it: making it stand, making it fall. Still, she had the sense that the rabbits were watching her and pushed him away.
A gentleman in matters of thwarted seduction, Nick wrapped up his expedition of the upper floors, then led them down the front stairs with its wonderfully polished banister and considerable newel posts. At the landing, he instructed Claudia to close her eyes. Taking her by the hand, he led her across a floor that loosed a haunted cry under her weight. Her bare feet felt the cool hardwood give way to a soft expanse of rug. She dug her toes into the woolly fibers.
“Okay,” Nick said. “Open.”
The parlor — a mortuary stiffness in the room’s décor stopped Claudia from thinking of it as a living room — bore the stamp of high Victorian style. The furniture crouched heavy and ornate under lamps shaded in tasseled silk; there was even a harp in one corner, ready to sing the deceased to their final rest. All that separated this room from the receiving room at Dunn’s Funeral Home were the rabbits. Compared to here, the figures scattered throughout the house seemed like outliers. Here was the warren. Here, the richly appointed burrows. Nearly every surface, literally every shelf on every massive hutch, filled with rabbits.
Claudia clasped her hands together and laughed. Astonished and a little spooked, as if the figurines might twitch alive at any moment and come bounding toward her, she said, “I did a report on rabbits in fifth grade.”
“Who did you have?”
“Mrs. Vonstitina.”
“Native American Week?”
“You had her too?”
“My brother did. He chose a hedgehog. Not a lion or a wolf or even a deer. His spirit guide was a hedgehog.” He tapped his forehead sharply and said, “That should have been our first clue.”
“Rabbits symbolize luck. Obviously. And longevity, because they have a million babies. You know, like a long family line. And rebirth.”
Nick tightened the sharklike circle he made around her. “I don’t believe in rebirth,” he said. “When you’re dead, you’re dead. But I do believe in longevity. In a long family line. And I definitely believe in what gets you there.” He was close enough to her now that she could smell the day’s work on him, paint and sun and sweet, oniony sweat.
“Predictable,” she muttered.
Zeroing in from behind, he grabbed her tightly around the waist, put his lips to her ear, and asked, “What was that?”
“I said you’re predictable.”
His dick, hard again, was the only response he offered, rocking her back and forth against it as if their bodies were sticks that might catch fire.
“Just like a rabbit.”
He pulled back the sizeable mass of her hair and kissed her neck, then moved his hands, a bit mechanically, as if he were rehearsing each move in his head before he made it, to her breasts. Their lovemaking was more academic than passionate in those early days, as if they were trying to please Monsieur Prendergast with their conjugation of French verbs, but they were committed students and seized almost any opportunity to practice.
“What if they come home?” she whispered, realizing as soon as the words were out of her mouth that she’d made her concession.
“Lake George is fifty miles away,” Nick crooned. “Mr. Anselman drives, like, fifteen miles an hour.”
Claudia turned to face him, her mouth declaring that no matter how slowly he drove, Mr. Anselman would eagle eye their every fingerprint, even while her hand was plunging past the elastic band of his underwear to grab hold of what stabbed her. Luckily, Nick didn’t mind mixed signals. As he got down on his knees on the wine-colored floral rug, Claudia followed. They were out of their clothes in minutes, rolling back and forth across a field of finely woven gold primrose with a hundred inscrutable rabbits silently looking on.
Claudia shook herself back into the idling car. She slipped into gear and drove on, trailing behind her the memory of that afternoon — rutting among the glass menagerie — until she hit the main thoroughfare out of town. The road followed the great, iron-colored vein of the river, where houses that had seen better days looked as though they might at any moment abandon their foundations and slide into the water. Eventually, as the houses grew more derelict and the yards more dirt than grass, Claudia came to Alluvia’s only stoplight. Here the village proper, which was not without its charm, met the more sprawling town, in which one was hard pressed to find anything like it. To travelers on Route 4, the light was a Cyclops’ eye forever blinking yellow, a warning to those passing through, Claudia and Benji joked, not to stop, to keep going no matter what, but on this morning, Claudia stopped. Ahead was Saratoga and Bemis Heights, the sites of bloody historical interest her teachers had taught her to revere as a child. To the left, across a camelback bridge painted an apocalyptic shade of gray, lay open country. Dairy farms, an abandoned drive-in theater now used to store fireworks, and, beyond that, the offices of Amato & Sons.
She made the turn. Fifteen minutes later, oblivious to the paint-by-numbers beauty of green fields rolling gently under a pink, post-storm sky, she turned into a large paved lot. A low, unassuming building marked “Office” stood surrounded by a compound of garages and warehouses enclosed by a chain-link fence. Other than the sign that sat atop the roof, the A in Amato topped with a jaunty hard hat, the place had all the appeal of a military barracks: dreary, anonymous, beige. The puddled lot was empty, but she chose a space close to the front door and turned off the car. At rest at last, a safe distance away from Max and her uncertain but unshakable responsibility to him, she felt the tension that had seized her over the last day suddenly release. A giant cable that ran through her body and pulled every muscle to the point of snapping suddenly went slack. She sensed the relief, but the relief was too much to bear, and she startled herself with a terrible, shaking sob. But crying inside the car proved impossible. How could she cry when she couldn’t breathe?
Shouldering open the door, Claudia jumped out and paced the blacktop, up and down, restoring herself to order with a few greedy mouthfuls of air. There was time to turn back. She could do so now, and Nick would be none the wiser. Wiping the tears from her face, she took her place behind the wheel. She turned the key in the ignition but couldn’t bring herself to shut the door. The alarm, a vexing ding, ding, ding, that drill, drill, drilled its way into her brain’s last reserve of equanimity, let loose a torrent of anger and enmity that swept her poise, her polish away. Grabbing the door handle as though she meant to strangle it, she pulled the door shut with such force she thought the window might break, an idea that held a certain and sudden appeal. To feel it shattered by her hands! Claudia opened the door and slammed it again. She smashed it shut as quickly and forcefully as she could, again and again, like a woman caught in some malign meme, like a woman gone mad, until an unignorable pop in her shoulder made her stop. She whimpered, rubbing the knot with a pathetic gaze into the rearview mirror. “Ow!” she cried.
~ ~ ~
The reverend doesn’t know what to make of it. He stands before us in the modest luxury of George Newland’s living room, looking at the woman who one day long ago he held over the baptismal font. He has watched her childhood pass in the patent leathers and pastels of Easter. He has pinned the confirmation cross to her dress. Though she is thirty-five, to him she will always be a child of God, and though God had not yet made manifest what she should be, the reverend cannot imagine that this is it. She is too old to be a hippie, to stand before him in a ragtag dress with flowers in her hair and a new, self-selected name. But the road she travels seems to have led to the same place, the very place it would have if she’d christened herself Starshine or China Rose, to the side of a man six years her junior and a baby that (Evelyn admitted to him in confidence) belongs to a woman who’s disappeared. He looks on her with his sad, worried eyes and sees that she loves me as if I’m the only man left to love. He sees that she loves me though I love another. That she loves me out of all proportion to what I deserve. He sees it, as I see it. Though, for this, he alone is inclined to forgive.